John Keegan, 1934-2012, R.I.P.

[The Bread Guy]

Sir John Keegan, who has died aged 78, achieved an international reputation as a military historian, then discovered a talent for writing rapid analyses of international crises as the defence editor of The Daily Telegraph.

He had been on the teaching staff of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, for 25 years in 1986 when Max Hastings announced his recruitment to the paper the day he took over the editor’s chair. Keegan proved an unrivalled asset as the Soviet empire crumbled and collapsed, the government demanded a “peace dividend” in the form of cutbacks to the Armed Forces and a series of military actions flared up in the Middle East and the Balkans.

Whatever the subject before him, Keegan wrote with close knowledge of the military arts and a personal acquaintance with many senior serving officers who had been his pupils; above all, he demonstrated a deep awareness of the human aspects of warfare, which was cruel, confusing and frightening, if occasionally glorious.

It was always with surprise that new acquaintances discovered that Keegan was no battle-hardened veteran. He was a gentle civilian who was deeply imbued with his Roman Catholic faith and had been crippled with tuberculosis since childhood. While an unabashed supporter of the British alliance with the United States, he described himself as “95 per cent pacifist” and looked forward – though with increasing doubts in recent years — to a world which had abandoned war ....

The Telegraph, 2 Aug 12

John Keegan, an Englishman widely considered to be the pre-eminent military historian of his era and the author of more than 20 books, including the masterwork “The Face of Battle,” died Thursday at his home in Kilmington, England. He was 78.

His death was announced in The Telegraph, where he had served as the military affairs editor. No cause of death was given, though Con Coughlin, the paper’s executive foreign editor, said in an e-mail that Mr. Keegan had died after a long illness.

Mr. Keegan never served in the military. At 13, he contracted orthopedic tuberculosis and spent the next nine years being treated for it, five of them in a hospital, where he used the time to learn Latin and Greek from a chaplain. As he acknowledged in the introduction to “The Face of Battle,” he had “not been in a battle, nor near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath.”

But he said he learned in 1984 “how physically disgusting battlefields are” and “what it feels like to be frightened” when The Telegraph sent him to Beirut, Lebanon, to write about the civil war there ....

New York Times, 2 Aug 12

 

[Rifleman62]

Currently reading "The Face of Battle" for the umpteenth time prior to reading Cornwell's  Azincourt.

Sir John will be missed.

 

[exspy]

I've really enjoyed his work.  A great writer with a unique insight on the subject of war.

Sir John Keegan

 

[cupper]

 

[Edward Campbell]

A sad loss to the history community. he was an insightful and original thinker, especially regarding the very nature and causes of war which he saw as more cultural than either biological or economic.

RIP, Sir John. 

 

[Ignatius J. Reilly]

While I have many reservations about some of his writing, he surely enabled much of modern military history, bringing such to a wider audience.
May his memory and his works live on.

 

[daftandbarmy]

I heard him lecture at Sandhurst. A first class academic with an even better ability to communicate his findings to an audience, especially when they were completely contradictory to that audiences' prevalent belief systems.

The world is a smaller place.